I've had a look in several browsers, including IE8, and it looks fine in all of them. One little thing is that if anyone looks at it with a huge screen with their browser maximised, they get a large expanse of wood grain to the right. My preference would be for centring the content so the desktop is to either side. But that's a small thing.
I agree it's a little graphic heavy, so if you could tighten that up a little it would improve load times.
Looking at the source, one thing I note is that the title "Friendly Pedant" appears to be part of a background image, and the only place this appears in the page source is in the TITLE tag. This could put you at a disadvantage for search engines, which tend to rank page content over header tags. This seems unnecessary since the heading is in a plain font with no fancy effects. It would be better to have it as text in a H! tag, styled with CSS.
It's good that you have your name in the heading, but I'd elevate it to a H1 or H2 tag to let the search engines know it's important.
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I agree it's a little graphic heavy, so if you could tighten that up a little it would improve load times.
Looking at the source, one thing I note is that the title "Friendly Pedant" appears to be part of a background image, and the only place this appears in the page source is in the TITLE tag. This could put you at a disadvantage for search engines, which tend to rank page content over header tags. This seems unnecessary since the heading is in a plain font with no fancy effects. It would be better to have it as text in a H! tag, styled with CSS.
It's good that you have your name in the heading, but I'd elevate it to a H1 or H2 tag to let the search engines know it's important.
Great work.